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Talk:...A Million Miles from Home.../@comment-5870856-20150425231334/@comment-5870856-20150518013413
Well, first of all, and I can't stress this enough, remember the golden rule - show, don't tell. I feel like this is an extremely important part of making your story work, and it will help readers to become infinitely more involved. A good example is the details of Alban's failure. I mean, Gistiloft is presumably a fairly large town, given that people in Lacytofft know where it is and Lacytofft is supposed to be a good distance from there. I get that it's a maritime town, but seriously, there are probably infinite odd jobs he could take. For example, perhaps he could work on his parents' farm? Not much of a career, but he'd help put food on their table. Or he could work at a local store, which towns this size will have at least a dozen of. Perhaps he could sell goods? If this is a sailing town, what do all those ships do? Logically, there must be merchants and an inflow of merchandise, so sell merchandise. My point is, you shouldn't just say "he's a bad sailor, so he had to get out". You need to show us that some course of events forces him to leave. Perhaps the werewolves destroyed the farm and he can't support his family anymore, so he has to leave Gistiloft to get a job elsewhere? Or he does something horrible during the battle and becomes ostracized, like, I dunno, he kills some dude after he gets bitten to stop him from turning into a werewolf? This ties into another point I should emphasize - make sure everything makes sense. Scrutinize everything and do nothing halfway. You absolutely don't want readers pointing out mistakes, and I noticed quite a few. There's the above one about their getting kicked out of Gistiloft for... like, no reason. However, a lot of them are way less obvious, especially grammar/spelling mistakes. Those are the most common, and unfortunately most boring to correct, problems. Heck, I screw words up all the time! Sadly, they must be fixed if you really want to make your story work. And please, try to maintain internal logic. Like, if Aria hasn't been in Lacytofft since forever and she's been living on a farm all that time, how can she have remembered how to do fairly advanced magic stuff like making that bracelet for Kristine? Thirdly, try to reduce the flowery-ness. Take the title and chapter names for instance. ...A Million Miles From Home... just makes it sounds like you're trying to impress people by making everything sound like prose and ...surrounding things with ellipses... to the point where it's no longer a story, it's a poem. ...Where Innocence is Burned in Flames...? Why not just Death of Innocence? Sometimes, less is more. Maybe you should try to think up a simpler title which encapsulates your story and isn't too convoluted. How about Exiles? Or The Outcasts? Maybe Far From Home? Nomads? Lost? That goes for a lot of other details too. Place names, for instance - Lacytofft? How do you pronounce that, "lackey-toft"? "Lass-i-toaft"? And why are there two 'f's? It just sounds like it's trying to impress for all the wrong reasons. Finally, I think there should be some sort of set goal. I mean, right now, all they're doing is wandering through the forest and getting attacked by random bandits while meeting one-off supporting characters. I mean, some stories can work with that sort of plot - Gulliver's Travels, for instance, and The Hobbit. But both of those stories were actually going somewhere. In the former, Gulliver just wants to go home, while in the latter, the company are headed to Erebor to slay a dragon and reclaim a kingdom. There are a few possible plot threads you could take advantage of to give this story more of a direction. For example, perhaps Galinar tells them about some sort of wizard or magician who can cure Kristine of her lycanthropy? Or maybe Alban is sent on some kind of ritual quest to atone for whatever mistake he made in Gistiloft? What if they join Galiana and the Krettin Thuro tribe on a quest to defeat an evil Skullwakener who slew their tribe's leader? Just have them going somewhere instead of nowhere, and it'll make this story so much better. Tbh, I've only scratched the surface. There are all kinds of other flaws with this story, like weak characters, poor pacing, overlong chapters and a pretty generic plot, but that's all I've got in me for now. I might follow up, but I think you get the idea. I mean, hell, how long ago did you write most of this? A year, maybe two? We all have stories we wrote a while back that we kick ourselves over later. I've written some duds myself (please, don't ask me about To Jump Or Not to Jump. EVER.). Point is, the more mistakes you make, the more you learn and the better your writing becomes. I've seen some of your stuff on Hellcat Squadran, it's really good, and I think if you revisit this story, it'll be much better the second time around :) I guess that's all there is to say. Or to put it another way: